


spectre

by Elendraug



Series: second go [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Awkward Conversations, Canon Compliant, Catharsis, Domesticity, Dream Bubbles, Illustrated, M/M, Post-Canon, Quadrant Blurring, Sprite Prototyping, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-27
Updated: 2019-01-27
Packaged: 2019-10-17 19:17:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17566415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elendraug/pseuds/Elendraug
Summary: every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam





	1. fic

**Author's Note:**

> me to me: dredge up everything you've been feeling for them for the last 8 years as if from the bottom of the ocean and put it in this fic

# [♫ ](https://tycho.bandcamp.com/track/spectre-bibio-remix)

There’s a quiet that’s settled over Sollux’s hive, the living room shielded from harsh Alternian sunlight by way of its utter absence. There’s nothing to see out there, nothing concrete in the ever-shifting landscape of others’ imaginations. 

Sollux uses a knife to coat two slices of grubloaf with grub sauce, stacks the other fixings onto the opposite slices, and bisects the sandwiches on the diagonal once they’re assembled. The metal makes a dull, unpleasant sound against the plastic nutrition plateaus.

He crosses from the kitchen to the couch, footsteps soft with mismatched socks, and hands one of the two plates to Eridan.

“Here’s lunch.”

“So _now_ you’re serving me?”

Sollux stares at him with golden eyes, his irises nearly blending with the color of his sclerae. “Let’s not make this a thing, okay?”

Eridan scoffs but accepts the offering, and rests the plate on his knees. He’s traded the stripes for solid fabric, uninterested in wallowing in the attire of a prior life.

“What is this?”

Sollux sits beside him on the couch and balances his plate in the same way. “Gobblefiend and dairy squares, with grub sauce.”

“This is what I’ve been reduced to.” He takes a bite, his sharp teeth easily slicing through the layers of food, if maybe mildly less useful when chewing. “Eating cold turkey sandwiches.”

“You’re not dating a troll Michelin star chef,” Sollux takes a bite, too, and speaks the rest of the sentence with food in his mouth, “you’re dating me.”

The silence resumes, and Eridan wipes grub sauce away from his mouth with the back of his hand. His skin is smeared with jade green.

“You don’t have to eat it if you don’t want to.”

“I know.”

“You don’t have to eat _anything_ if you don’t want to. Or do fucking anything anymore.”

Eridan regards the crumbs on the plate with mild disdain. “I know that, too.” 

Sollux waits for him to say something else, but when the words never come, he returns to his meal. All his teeth are back where they belonged, and the whole scene is uneventful. Mundane, even.

The space between them is scant, with sinking cushions that persist through his memory. There’s a faint scent of stale tuber chips, long since crumbled into the upholstery back when they were both young, and resurrected to inhabit this world along with them.

Sollux finishes his food first, too accustomed to having it at risk of a ration reduction to savor much of anything. He watches Eridan from the corner of his eye, observes him picking at the grubloaf crusts.

“Is something wrong?” When he’s not chewing, his speech, including sibilance, is without issue.

Eridan lifts his head to look at him, unused to the genuine eye contact, and shrugs.

“Do you really not like it?” Sollux nods towards the nutrition plateau. “Next time we can do fish, I guess.”

“I’m just not very hungry.”

“Yeah.” Sollux takes the plate from him and puts Eridan’s, with its half-eaten sandwich, on top of his own empty one. “Me neither.”

Eridan watches Sollux’s bony knees as he stands up, with pant legs cut so skinny it would seem absurd if they weren’t the necessary fit for his calves.

Sollux sets the dishes in the sink, and it’s when he begins to run the water that Eridan speaks up again.

“What’s wrong with us?”

He shuts the tap back off and dries his hands. “Do you want me to say something reassuring, or my honest opinion?”

“I don’t have a lot of use for bullshit, and you know it.”

Sollux looks at the water-logged grubloaf, marked with multiple impressions of Eridan’s teeth, and wonders if it will fit down the disposal. He’s not sure it even matters, with where it is that they’re at.

“I think,” he says, turning back towards him, “that we’re not supposed to exist like this.”

“Like what?”

“Like this,” he repeats, gesturing between the two of them, his fingers tapping against his temple for emphasis. “With bits of our brains still stuck together.”

“Well, no shit.”

“You’re the one who asked.” 

Eridan shifts on the couch to cross one leg over his opposite knee. “Say something reassuring.”

Sollux lingers in the liminal space that separates the two rooms, an imaginary line connecting angles drawn in the open air. “Am I tied to your dock?”

“Huh?”

“It’s something you said, while we were the same guy.” He approaches slowly, but not with caution. He’s in his own home. “To Jake.”

“About having a piece of ass tied to a dock?” Eridan bounces his leg with nervous energy. “That was an asshole thing to say.”

“Yeah, it was. But it doesn’t have to be.” Sollux sits back down.

“How would that _not_ be an asshole thing to say?” His foot briefly nudges Sollux’s thigh. 

“It’s contextual.” Sollux looks down at his leg. Eridan’s socks are navy blue. “It’s about the connotation and not casting someone off unnecessarily.”

“What, setting them adrift?” He rolls his eyes behind his glasses. “You trying to get poetic with this?”

“I don’t know. Whatever.”

“Lame.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Sollux leans forward, rests his elbows on his knees, still watching Eridan fidget and occasionally poke him with his toes, intentionally or not. 

“Why are you being so sincere all of a sudden?” 

“You asked me to be.”

“None of this was comforting.” Eridan lowers his foot back to the floor, but it doesn’t change their proximity on a sofa that was too small to be truly comfortable even sweeps ago. “That’s what I asked you for. Not pseudo-philosophical... whatever that shit was.”

Sollux looks at the far wall and waits until he can feel Eridan’s posture relax slightly beside him. “You know what else we said?” 

Eridan immediately tenses again. “I’ve been trying to put all this out of my pan, Sol.”

“We said that deep down, we just love suffering.” He turns to meet Eridan’s gaze, and maybe it’s the presence of pupils that is lending the additional gravitas to the same statements he’d already been making. “But my head doesn’t hurt anymore.”

“Well, that makes one of us.”

Sollux lets out a sigh through his nose and tries to suss out the phrasing that will assuage the situation. “I’ve been thinking a lot.”

“What else is new?”

“ _And_ ,” he proceeds, undeterred, “I think that so much of this is self-imposed.”

Eridan’s feet are planted firmly against the ground, as if the floorboards of this envisioned communal hivestem could somehow moor him more than his own salvaged shipwreck. He doesn’t respond verbally, but the nonverbal cues are enough.

“And, you know, when you’re that close to somebody, you develop this understanding of them, whether you both want to or not.”

Eridan closes his eyes. “Don’t put me through this, Captor.”

“I know you don’t want to hear it,” he continues, watching Eridan’s eyelashes waver against his cheek, behind the lenses, “but you don’t have to go it alone anymore.” 

“What do you expect me to say to that?” Eridan’s anger is lodged in his throat. “What, like we can just sit here and wish it all away?”

“And it still sucks, but look.” Sollux lets his hands drop between his knees, twists his fingers together. “There’s a million instances of all our friends out there and when you’re facing this... this magnitude, of this infinite universe...”

Eridan’s breathing is audible. His toes curl against the floor; Sollux can see his claws starting to strain the knit of the socks.

“...it just seems pointless to keep spinning our wheels about it.”

There’s another long beat before he replies. “Are you forgiving me?”

“I don’t know.” Sollux looks at his wrists. “But I know self-flagellation isn’t actually contrition.”

Eridan says nothing.

“I can’t forgive you on behalf of anyone else, and as far it goes for me, I just don’t care anymore. I’m over it.”

He huffs. “It’s that easy, huh?”

“Maybe it is. Maybe if you decide for it to be.”

“That shit was heinous.”

Sollux glances to him, and it’s still early into the newfound exchanges of anyone seeing him with expression visibly obvious in his eyes. “If you're seeking catharsis, you're the one who has to make it happen. I can't do it for you, and neither can anyone else.”

Eridan crosses his arms over his chest, his neck no longer tethered to a scarf. 

“Eridan,” he says, addressing him directly, despite the tone of his body language. “There’s another me out there spending time with AA, and any more of _me_ just becomes extraneous.”

“Who gives a shit about that guy?” The hostility of his words is undercut by an abrupt change in his inflection to something more sympathetic. “Worrying about him is a waste of time.”

“I’ve got his eyesight.” Sollux blinks twice, warding off the tightness in his chest. “So the least I can do is not be blind to what’s in front of me.”

Eridan curves his arms further downward, to tuck around his torso, lower across his stomach like the effort could hold himself together.

“If you want an oceanic analogy, here you go: you’ve hooked all this misery that’s trying to pull itself away from you, and you're struggling with the line, insisting on reeling it back in.” He looks at Eridan’s averted eyes. “Just let it drop.”

“Like an anchor?”

“If you want to mix your metaphors, sure.”

The room goes silent once again, in the earlier end of a diurnal afternoon, with light catching on dust that’s there only by their unconscious assumption that it should be, so much particulate arising from the collections of books and games and circuit boards whenever either of them moves through the space. They’re eating lunch past midnight, by their own circadian rhythms, and their entire assessment of normalcy has inverted.

Eridan sits up, his hair backlit by the beams of some other sun, glossy black and interrupted with a saturated brushstroke that trails color over the crown of his head in parallel with his horns.

Sollux straightens his shoulders, and wills the intake of oxygen with the improved posture to ease the knot of conflicted physiological responses that has tangled through his ribs like a mess of wires.

Eridan looks at him and speaks as a semi-silhouette. “What are you going to do, kiss me?”

Breathing more deeply won’t be enough. “Is that something I should do?

“We’ve already spent plenty of time doing stupid shit we shouldn’t do.”

“That’s one way to spin it.”

They evaluate each other with eyes filled in with evidence of their spectrum hierarchy as they’ve aged, both grown past the bitter sore spots that had festered between them, washed in with the whimsy of the kernelsprite and drawn back out with the receding tide as their expanded constructional consciousness dissipated into fleeting fragments of sense memory.

Eridan’s mouth is a dark line like a trench, his lips blackened with his mood and the possibility of a product application that Sollux wants to taste.

Eridan licks his lips and asks in a rush. “Are you going to—”

“Yeah.”

Sollux shifts to lean in towards him, and Eridan cups his palm under Sollux’s elbow to encourage it, and the tension set into their jawlines soothes as Eridan’s hand slides up Sollux’s arm and Sollux’s fingers settle just below Eridan’s facial fin. 

When they pull apart, Sollux rests his forehead against Eridan’s as if he could know his thoughts through a near field connection in lieu of some cerulean telepathy. His bangs brush against the wispy flyaways that have changed direction from the rest of Eridan’s self-styled presentation. 

Sollux kisses him a second time, quickly, and comes away with borrowed beeswax on his lips.

Eridan sighs. “That wasn’t as awful as I thought it would be.”

“Maybe we should do it again just to be sure,” Sollux suggests, breathily. “Since you’re a man of science and all.”

Eridan stares with lowered eyelids at Sollux’s mouth. “Yeah, I gotta test this hypothesis for academic purposes.”

“Whatever you want to tell yourself.”

It’s Eridan then who lifts his head to chase after him and kiss him again, and he lets his eyes slide entirely shut as Sollux drapes a leg over his lap and an arm around his back and brings him in, to turn and brace against the back of the couch.

“Would you really stay with me?” Eridan asks, still with his eyes closed, to guard against the potential answer. “Is that what you actually want?”

Sollux nods and speaks his reply against the corner of his mouth. “Yes.”

The corner of Eridan’s mouth twitches up, nearly in disbelief, and Sollux kisses the spot.

Sollux curls closer, his warmth captured between them, and when Eridan’s hand lifts to splay his fingers over his sternum, the endless stressors of his existence start to disentangle.

* * *

_Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam._

_The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds._

_Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves._

_The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand._

_It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known._

[Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994](http://www.planetary.org/explore/space-topics/earth/pale-blue-dot.html)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I spent like an hour trying to figure out how to condense the quote but couldn't bear to, so you just get to enjoy the whole thing


	2. comic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> fucking RAD comic/illustration by Mangrit, thank you so much!! 💛💜

****

## like/reblog the artwork: [tumblr](http://divorceinaugust.tumblr.com/post/184238970103/i-drew-this-scene-from-a-part-of-my-friends) | [pillowfort](https://www.pillowfort.io/posts/600403) | [deviantART](http://divorceinaugust.tumblr.com/post/184238970103/i-drew-this-scene-from-a-part-of-my-friends)

****

[ ](https://66.media.tumblr.com/f40b0ae8fc4169d4e33b9a2f829f080f/tumblr_pq1rmdev5y1tzsjb4o1_1280.png)

[ ](https://66.media.tumblr.com/2a7a24854c6c8664099a04685433eca4/tumblr_pq1rmdev5y1tzsjb4o2_1280.png)

[ ](https://66.media.tumblr.com/4a14912a7f121ab94b82f34f253f5e41/tumblr_pq1rmdev5y1tzsjb4o3_1280.png)

[ ](https://66.media.tumblr.com/d069819f2c27c5b8739009b609e096ff/tumblr_pq1rmdev5y1tzsjb4o4_r1_1280.png)

[ ](https://66.media.tumblr.com/ebba2ec3b7d5725fa42aece975b9e4ec/tumblr_pq1rmdev5y1tzsjb4o6_r2_1280.png)

[ ](https://66.media.tumblr.com/439ea7a3ebdb16edc1f175f7f6a74830/tumblr_pq1rmdev5y1tzsjb4o5_r1_1280.png)


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